Personality and individual differences

This chapter addresses how organizations view personality, and how they try to measure this during the recruitment and selection process to appoint the type of personality that they think will fit a job. It examines three approaches to the study of personality: the nomothetic approach, the ideographic approach, and the social–radical approach. The chapter then explains how the key personality distinction of introversion and extraversion relates to the workplace, before describing the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator and how it relates to career development. It also looks at the big five personality scale and explains how this relates to personality testing. Finally, the chapter evaluates several alternative approaches to recruitment and selection, including social media, artificial intelligence (AI), and assessment centres.